All the niggly-wiggly, petty-piggledy parts
that are not in the grand scale get jettisoned,
with the Greek-of-this and the Greek-of-that
meaning the more you know of every little tittle,
the swifter you can drop it from the whole.
And that that, God help us, is reasonable!
Just so.

There is something I need to remind myself of often: concentrate on what yields fundamental joy and do not worry about the little things that have little effect.

This concept actually has a sort-of parallel in science. Ever wonder how your GPS figures out—from the near-infinite number of routes available—what is the fastest route?

The science of algorithm development is amazing and subtle. Often, the idea is not to concentrate on how long a particular task takes, but how the analysis scales proportionally to the size of the dataset. The important thing is to get to the essence of the math so you can throw out the parts that only have a minor effect on the end result. (If you’re techy enough to want to know more about the mathematics of all this, try this article as a starter and don’t blame me if you fall in a hole you cannot crawl out of!)

Thank you for reading Big Thetas, Omegas and O’s. I humbly appreciate your visiting the Book of Pain, and as always, I look forward to your comments.

The photograph was taken at home and is a macro study of a leaf of red cabbage. To see my photography blog, please visit the Book of Bokeh.